Village Gateway guide
A step-by-step guide for a new Village owner, from asking for an evaluation link to checking a decision record yourself. Words in quotation marks are the words on the approvals page.
Ask for evaluation access About Village Gateway Questions and answers
Ten steps
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Ask for evaluation access
Open the evaluation request page and tell us who you are and what you would like to govern.
We reply by email. Each link works once and is issued at our discretion.
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Open the link and create your Village
Opening the link starts your 30-day evaluation and takes you to the page where you create your Village. You become its owner.
Confirm your email address. Village Gateway is then turned on for your Village, with four starting categories installed in your name: machine intelligence and automation; financial records and transactions; governance decisions and communications; provenance and supply-chain evidence.
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Add your payment card
In your Village, open “Village Gateway approvals” from your user menu, then follow the link “Your evaluation and card”.
Choose between one and four categories and a billing term, monthly or annual. The page shows the total. Enter your card: the details go straight to Airwallex, our payment provider, and your bank may ask you to confirm.
Your card is checked and nothing is charged. The first charge is on the day your evaluation ends, unless you cancel before then. Only the Village owner, or a person the owner has given billing authority, can use this page.
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Create a Gateway key
On the approvals page, under “Gateway keys”, give the key a name and choose what it is for. “Asks for decisions” is the kind an agent uses. “Checks and uses permits” is for the system the agent acts on, so the same key can never both ask for a permit and use it.
You are asked to confirm who you are, with a passkey, a two-step code or your password. The key is then shown once: copy it and keep it as private as a password. Only the Village owner can create or revoke a key.
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Give the key an authority
An authority says what a key may ask for: which action, on which resource, up to what amount and until when. Under the key, choose “Use this key in the authority form”, then complete the other fields of the “Grant an authority” form.
Tick “A person must approve each use” if every request under it should wait for a person. Every authority has an end date. The Village owner can grant and revoke authorities.
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Connect the agent
The agent connects over MCP to the address /mcp/village-gateway on your Village's own web address, and shows its key with every request. Through MCP it can ask for a decision, read a decision and take a permit. It cannot approve anything.
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See a decision
When the agent asks, Village Gateway checks the request against your Village policy before anything happens and answers allow, hold for approval, or deny. The agent reads the answer back with its key.
Every decision is recorded with a signed receipt, which is then sent to an outside time-stamping authority. A request that needs a person appears on the approvals page under “Waiting for approval”.
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Approve a held request
Read what will happen before you approve: who asked, the action, the resource, the amount and why it was held. Add a reason if you like, choose “Approve” and confirm who you are. Your approval covers exactly the action shown.
The Village owner or a moderator can approve; an older administrator role counts as a moderator. The person who owns the key that made the request can never approve it. A held request waits for up to 24 hours, then expires. Once approved, the agent can take a one-use permit, which the system it acts on redeems once.
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Check the record
Whoever runs the agent uses its key to download the decision's exported record and your Village's bundle of public keys from Village Gateway.
Download the checking program from the technical page and compare its SHA-256 with the published value. Run it with Node.js 20 or newer, on any computer, with no network connection and no account. Exit code 0 means every mandatory check passed; 1 means a check failed or could not be made.
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Cancel
Cancel on the card page that “Your evaluation and card” opens. During the evaluation nothing is charged, and you keep Village Gateway until the evaluation end date.
After the evaluation, a monthly subscription runs to the end of the month you have paid for, and an annual one ends when you cancel, with the unused whole months refunded as the pricing page explains.
What Village Gateway controls
An AI agent asks Village Gateway before an important action. Your rules decide. The decision is a signed record you can check offline, and an approved action gets a single-use permit for exactly that action. The Village owner can stop every Gateway decision and permit for every AI agent at once, set a spending limit for each agent key, and see counts of what was checked over any period.
Putting Village Gateway in the path of an action takes four steps. The agent describes what it wants to do, and Village Gateway answers: go ahead, wait for approval, or no. A cleared action receives a permit made for exactly that action. The system that carries out the action checks the permit with Village Gateway before it acts, and each permit works once. The outcome is reported back and joins the record. Because the system that does the work asks for the permit, nothing it does goes ahead without a decision from Village Gateway. A small reference program, built and tested, shows the whole route and is available on request.
MIO° Conduct Record is the sealed register of which AI agents an organisation runs and what each is authorised to do, available on request. The register records authority and does not block anything. Village Gateway can check any request it governs against the mandate in force for the agent, where a policy asks for it: the action, the resource, the amount and the time window must fall within the mandate, or the request is denied. The Email Decision Record has a narrower check for sending email, which compares the action's name only. Both checks are built. Each one stays off until the operator turns it on.
Help
For anything this guide does not answer, write to support@mysovereignty.digital or use the contact page.